European researchers have developped a new shoe aimed at helping elderly people walk more safely

8 November 2010

Fiorella Marcellini is a coordinator at Smiling (Self Mobility Improvement in the eLderly by counteractING), a European Union research project:
“In 2008, there were some 84 million elderly people in the European Union. A third of them face the risk of falling. That’s around 28 million people. Falls are a huge, dangerous risk for millions of people.”
“Elderly people who have suffered a fall don’t just lose their balance at a given moment,” she says. “There’s often a cause or an aftermath. Many of them also lose the ability to walk safely, they are no longer able to link motor, physical movements with impulses coming from the brain. So they need training. And the best way to do this is to provide them with an unstable environment”.
And that is precisely the aim of this strange pair of shoes recently developed by European researchers.